Flames For "Make the Ordinary Interesting" Photo Contest

It's been ages since I have participated in a contest on Hive. I've done it countless times on the old chain, when I was at the beginning but over time somehow I've taken a different rout.

I've been eying Hive account@derangedvisions contests for some time, but somehow I always missed it. This week he has a pretty vague theme, Make the Ordinary Interesting, so I thought I'd try something new. I said the topic is vague, which can be both good and bad. Good because it gives you much more freedom and bad if you have no clue what to focus on.

Flames have been always fascinating for me. I've been looking at professional photos on the internet, thinking how cool they are and have been planning to take some photos myself, but making a fire is not easy in the city, not to mention you need darkness in order to make it cool.

With this occasion I thought it's time to put my plan in action and try to create something cool. As a subject I've chosen my stove as making fire outside is out of the question now. I thought how hard can it be to do a photo shoot about the flames on my stove?

Oh boy! Was I wrong? You have no idea! After a couple of shots, I had to realize my stove needed some cleaning as what was not visible at first glance, appeared as not pleasant on the camera. I had to learn I can't fool the camera. After cleaning my stove, I took some more photos but with caution as my biggest fear was getting too close to the flames and burning my phone case. I really love this one and can't buy it locally as it comes from China (like everything else or course) and I can't wait another month to get a new one.
So with great fear and a lot of caution I took a bunch of photos and was so pleased with how they looked on my phone. Then downloaded them to my laptop and had to slap myself as I saw they were not so great. Yes, there's a huge difference between small screen and big screen. So I had to take more photos.

Then I thought let's play with editing tools as it may help highlight some details and shift focus where I want to. Then I thought why not make a black and white series as well as it may look different.

So here it is my series. I don't know how you see it as beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, in other words what is beautiful to me may look ugly to you and vice versa. All I know that I got a tough lesson today from life, I had to work hard to be able to select five photos but I think I'm not going to give it up. Maybe next time I can take better photos.
So this is my entry to the amateur tier and I'm not hoping for anything. It was a fun experience though.